Gates of Hades

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

Jason had finished all but one chapter of the article in Adrian’s archaeological magazine in the waning hour of daylight as the Scot drove the short distance from Cumae. They had parked the Volvo in a lot near Pozzuoli’s ancient forty-thousand-seat Greek amphitheater in hopes it would remain unnoticed. Jason and Maria had taken a cab to Baia, leaving Adrian to find a van large enough to carry both him and the gear from the observatory.

They had found a single room in a small pensione. Jason had handed over the false passports and made sure the elderly proprietor had returned to his quarters before admitting Adrian, who had spent the night in a less than comfortable chair. Jason had hoped that the police would be looking for a trio, not a man and wife.

Early the next morning, Jason attempted to retrieve the passports after letting Adrian out through a window. The proprietor was not to be found, and Jason made a mental note to regain the documents later in the day. Now they waited among the crumbled walls of a Roman temple of Venus on a terrace above the present town. Below were the domes of the baths of Mercury and Venus, therapeutic springs used well into the Middle Ages.

The rising sun painted the bay the color of pink roses until it cleared the horizon, leaving the sky a cloudless blue tinged with purple, an expanse marked only by the twinkling eye of a single morning star until it, too, winked out.

Jason stood and stretched. “Do we know how to find wherever it is we’re going?”

Maria pointed up a slight slope. “There.”

Jason squinted. In the early light what he had mistaken for the rock face of a nearby hill bracketed by stumps of columns was in fact a single slab of cement. Closer inspection revealed a razor-wire fence partly concealed by scrub bush. He could not make out the words on a couple of faded signs. He was fairly certain they didn’t offer welcome.

“The Great Antrum to the underworld,” Maria announced.

“Not exactly hospitable,” Jason observed. “Someone sure doesn’t want us in there.”

“The Italian government,” Maria said. “They claim that it may collapse and it may be filled with poisonous gases. It has been sealed since 2001, remember?”

Jason helped her sling her air tank and regulator over a shoulder before picking up his own. “Since Robert Temple’s exploration.”

She was walking up the gentle slope. “Yes.”

They stopped at the strands of wire. A few minutes with a wire cutter from Adrian’s pack made a narrow but passable entrance. Now they stood at the base of a slope of some twenty feet, a solid face of concrete.

“This may na’ be so deft,” Adrian observed. “We canna spend th’ day chippin’ through cement.”

Jason, his hand touching the wall, was moving slowly to his left. He felt what he thought was a crack. He was looking at a rectangular cut around an area about five and a half by three, just large enough to admit a man. Someone had made an effort to conceal the seams with vegetation pulled from nearby.

Adrian took a few steps back, arms akimbo. “Y’ may have found a way in, but I’m doubtin’ th’ three of us kin lift such a slab.”

“Someone obviously can,” Jason replied. “Otherwise cutting it in here wouldn’t have made sense.”

Maria reached out a hand to run it across the surface. “This is not cement.”

“Not cement?” Jason echoed.

There was a flat thumping sound as Maria rapped her knuckles against the surface. “Not at all. Plastic.”

Adrian reached out and confirmed what she had said. “Someone must’ve cut a hole here and replaced it with lighter material.”

“Only reason they’d do that,” Jason said, “is so they can come in and out whenever they wish.”

There was no doubt as to who “they” were.

It took little effort to remove what was no more than a cleverly customized plastic form, one that a single person could easily lift and replace from inside. The three checked their regulators before struggling into the backpacks with heavy their air tanks and tested the lamps in their helmets. Adrian and Jason both made sure their weapons were readily accessible.

On his knees, Adrian leaned into the entrance. The hungry darkness swallowed the light of his helmet lamp. “Ye’re right, laddie, aboot someone comin’ in ’n’ out. There’s a ladder here.”

Sure enough, the entrance dropped straight down to a floor about six feet below before the passage disappeared under the hill. Jason helped Maria down.

Jason stood at the gates of Hades. He tried to remember how many people had prophesied his arrival.

Gas detector extended, Maria led the way single file down a corridor wide enough only for single file. Even so, Jason’s shoulders brushed against the walls constantly, and he bowed his head. The corridor wasn’t built for the size of a twenty-first-century man. Anyone who didn’t believe in evolution should try strolling through a passage carved two thousand years ago.

Rubble, either from Agrippa’s attempt to close the passages or moved there by one of the two explorations, littered the stone floor, sometimes piled so high that the trio had to crawl between it and the roof.

The lights on their helmets revealed chiseled marks on the low ceiling as the passage began a gradual descent. At regular intervals, the rock was streaked with black above small ledges that had once held lamps. There was the smell of long-dead earth and a silence that rang in the ears, a quiet that seemed to resent the interruption of footsteps upon stone. At the periphery of his light, Jason could see moving things, large insects, he guessed, indignant at the intrusion. They silently swarmed, divided, and reunited in hazy clouds before disappearing back into the sea of gloom.

He shined his light on a handheld compass for a few steps, surprised to see the excavation had been placed in a precise east — west orientation. How could that have been done underground before compasses were invented?

A few minutes later they entered a vaulted chamber, the roof invisible above. In the center, a slab of the native tufa rock had been carved with figures of gods and animals, still quite clear.

“A sacrificial altar,” Adrian whispered as though in a church. “Where animals were slaughtered, I’d guess.”

Past the chamber, the passageway took a sharp turn. Maria was so intent on the gas detector she bumped into the far wall before she saw it.

“Stronzo!” she exclaimed, backing into Adrian.

Jason was fairly certain the exclamation had not invoked the name of a saint. “You okay?”

He could see Maria rubbing her nose. “I will be fine,” she grumbled in a tone that said she didn’t believe it.

Jason took a step backward, the light on his helmet probing shadows he had not previously noticed. He looked closer. A slit carved into the rock led into an even narrower passageway that seemed to go in a direction that intercepted the angle made by the turn like the hypotenuse of a triangle. On one side, crumbling iron hinges were still visible.

Adrian had somehow managed to turn around despite the bulk of his backpack. “A concealed path, I’d say.”

Jason nodded. “One that would put the priests and animals in front of the visitor when they had been behind, just as Severenus described. That must have seemed like magic.”

“Na’ chance we could squeeze through wearin’ this kit?”

Jason shook his head. “We’d have to leave the air tanks here.”

“That would be unwise.” Maria’s head was poking around Adrian’s body. “If what Jason says is correct, we will see where this path comes out anyway.”

With Maria still holding the gauge in front of her like a crucifix leading a choir’s procession, they continued until they reached another chamber with its sacrificial altar. To the altar’s left was another ancient doorway, probably the end of the passage they had discovered a few minutes earlier. On the other side of the room, the slope decreased and flattened out.

Shortly past where the passage began again, they came to a dry riverbed. Their lights shone into only a void, the far shore being too far away to see. The water had been hardly three feet deep, but the sharp edges of the banks indicated the current had been swift. The streambed was mostly polished slabs of stone, making their crossing fairly easy.

The River Styx had been about a hundred feet wide, although the dark and the time it would have taken to pole against or across the flow could have made the distance seem longer.

The far bank was an immense cavern, sloping gently upward from the riverbed. Its walls soared like the nave of a cathedral until vanishing into darkness beyond the beams of their lights. A sole bat, disturbed by the illumination, flew erratic circles before disappearing into the dusk from which it had come.

“See here.” Adrian was kneeling over what at first looked like a slight depression in the rock floor. “It’s a hole with what looks like a tunnel at th’ bottom.”

“That would allow the ‘shades’ of the dead to appear and disappear,” Maria observed, pointing to several more.

Very interesting, Jason thought — but not what they had come to find. Walking slowly to avoid falling into one of the openings, he played his lantern across the nearest wall.

“Maria,” he called, “what do you make of this?”

She was beside him in a moment, both looking at a series of round gray boulders. Between each a scraggly, seemingly dead bush had been inserted into a hole cut into the rock floor. How could anything grow in such darkness? It couldn’t, Jason concluded. Someone had placed them here. But why?

Maria knelt on the hard-packed earth, running a hand over one of the rocks.

“Pumice.”

The word took Jason back to the house in Georgetown, to Saturday mornings when Laurin, clad in rubber gloves, goggles, and coveralls bearing the logo of some oil company, would begin work on an obvious piece of junk rescued from one of the local shops. Before the day was out, her abrasive — sandpaper and pumice — usually produced a treasure that had been hidden below years if not centuries of chipped paint and blackened varnish.

Even here in Hades, she followed him. She had always threatened she would. He pushed the thought away to concentrate on the problem. Laurin went reluctantly but with understanding.

“You mean like what people use to sand furniture?”

Adrian had joined them as Maria said, “It can be used as a fine sandpaper, yes. It is a volcanic glass, very poor, er… full of holes.”

“Porous?” Jason suggested.

“Very porous. And I will guess that it will match exactly the specimen you brought me.” She passed her meter over the stone, “Yes, just like the one you brought, I am receiving indications of ethylene gases. I have never seen such a property of volcanic rock before.”

“But why,” Jason asked, “would someone take rock from here halfway around the world, unless—”

There was a flash almost in front of Maria’s face. One of the bushes had begun to burn. More correctly, flame danced just above it, leaving the plant unconsumed. Almost immediately nearby stones began to give off a thin trail of smoke.

“The rock is giving up its gases as it heats,” she snapped. “Put your regulators in your mouths, and don’t breathe through your nose.”

As a scuba diver, Jason had no trouble doing just that. He was relieved to see that the other two seemed equally at home with the arrangement. He stood back as yet another of the scruffy plants seemed to burst into flame soundlessly. He could imagine the reaction of the drugged, susceptible young Roman, Severenus.

Or was it another sound that overrode the whisper of the flames? He listened intently. Had the solitary bat returned? No, what he heard was not the beating of tiny wings. It sounded more like…

Like footsteps from the darkness in front of them.

CHAPTER FORTY

Rassavitch had wanted to fly from New York to Savannah, but being subject to scrutiny both when he boarded for Atlanta and when he changed planes for Savannah was putting too much credibility in the Americans’ insistence on nonethnic profiling. That a post-9/11 United States would decline to detain someone spekaing heavily accented English to check his background and purpose for being on the aircraft more closely rather than offend someone was simply beyond belief. The Americans were polluters and despoilers but not idiots. Their much-proclaimed willingness to search and inquire of an equal number of blond Scandinavian and abaya-wearing, dark-skinned women who might well conceal anything under their loose-fitting robes was not egalitarian; it was suicidal.

Rassavitch didn’t believe a word of it.

With Rassavitch’s poor language skills, flat, Slavic face, and ghostly white skin, the authorities would surely study the New York driver’s permit he had effortlessly obtained. They would question him for hours. Somehow they would know he was here to destroy them.

So, he took the train, where there were no security precautions.

The cars were clean, quiet, and mostly empty. At first he wondered why more Americans did not use this mode of transportation. His answer came at every place the tracks paralleled a highway: automobiles sped by far faster than the train. So did the buses he saw.

He would have an opportunity to ride one of those buses from Atlanta, where the train would go on to New Orleans. From the bus to Savannah, he was to go to an address he had been given by a man who had sought him out yesterday and handed him a copy of Chekhov’s plays with the correct passages underlined. In the book had been ten one-hundred-dollar bills and an address in Savannah.

There was no indication as to what Rassavitch should do when he reached the Georgia port city, nor instructions as to how the money should be used, although it was obvious some of it would be spent reaching his destination. Once he got there, he would figure out what to do next.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

In front of Jason, Adrian stiffened, his head cocked to listen.

“Wha…?” Maria took the regulator from her mouth, then froze.

Jason inhaled and removed his regulator, whispering, “I’d say we’ve got company.”

“But who…?”

“You can bet it ain’t the Sibyl.”

He pointed to the light on his helmet as he turned it off. Maria and Adrian did the same, leaving them in a darkness punctuated with the flare of the bushes that did not burn. The gaseous flames cast flickering shadows that danced menacingly across the walls to make forms of fanciful creatures of all descriptions.

In fact, Jason thought at first that it was these imaginary creatures he saw emerging from the hazy darkness at the farthest point of the cavern. The thing looked insectlike, round eyes occupying a full three-quarters of a face with a tube for a mouth. Approaching with a low shuffling motion, it was something out of a bad sci-fi movie, although there was noting fictional about the automatic weapon it carried.

Jason’s hand went to his own face, searching for a leak in his breathing equipment that could have allowed him to inhale the hallucinatory fumes of the steaming rocks. As far as he could tell, the ethylene gas had nothing to do with what his eyes kept insisting he was perceiving and his brain kept trying to dismiss as impossible.

Another of the creatures emerged into the shimmering light, and Jason realized what he was actually seeing, ashamed of the relief he felt. The fire dancing above several bushes was reflecting off the glass eye ports of old-fashioned gas masks, their air hoses a trunklike connection to the air purification system on each man’s back.

Jason counted six of them. Mere men or not, they were now probing the reluctant shadows of the cavern with flashlights, both sweeping the floor with each step to prevent falling into one of the numerous shafts to the tunnel below, and searching every crevice. It required no effort to guess for whom.

Jason could see Adrian, a solid form of darkness to his left. Keeping a low profile, he pulled Maria behind as he duckwalked over, took a breath, and removed his mouthpiece. “We need to back out of here, same way we came.”

“That a fact?”

On all fours, hands outstretched, searching for unseen openings that could result in a fatal fall, Jason, Adrian, and Maria shuffled across the rubble-strewn floor.

Any doubt as to the intentions of the men in gas masks dissolved when a beam of light exposed Jason. He rolled violently to his left, shoving Maria away as a stream of gunfire chipped an explosion of tiny, shrapnel-like fragments from the stones where he had been. The sound was still booming off the walls and unseen ceiling as Adrian rolled onto his back and fired two single rounds from the captured Beretta in the direction of the muzzle flash. He was rewarded by a yelp of pain.

“The river,” Jason said, trying to keep his attention on the floor they were crossing. “If we can make it to the riverbed we should be able to see them better than they can see us.”

“Aye.” Adrian grunted. “But then, there’re a lot more of them than us.”

Adrian, always the optimist.

By the time the three slid down the steep bank of the riverbed, the flaming bushes were little more than a glow in the distant darkness, not enough light to frame their pursuers.

“We can put the breathing equipment away,” Maria whispered.

“You can read the gas gauge in the dark?” Adrian wanted to know.

She held it up, showing a tiny green light.

Thankful for the smallest of favors, Jason wriggled out of the heavy backpack, helped Maria off with hers, and led the group to the far side of the dry river. Without the equipment, they should easily outdistance those behind them. Halfway up the embankment they stopped, each looking over a shoulder.

“Sodding bastards’re comin’ right on,” Adrian whispered, seeing the beams of light sweeping the gully. “Wee long for a shot.”

“A bit long for their flashlights, too,” Jason said, starting back up the incline. “I wouldn’t be revealing our position by taking a shot at them.”

Jason reached the top first and reached back to take Maria’s hand.

“I can manage,” she said tartly.

Was it the tension or had he made some unknown misstep?

Once all three were atop the bank, they began to feel their way along the narrow passage through which they had entered. Here, at least, there were no holes concealed in the dark.

There was, however, endless rubble.

As Adrian tripped for the third time, he swore softly. “I’ll be bloody killin’ meself; I canna see.”

“If we turn on our lights, somebody else will do it for you.”

“Look!” Maria spoke aloud.

At the instant she spoke, Jason saw a glimmer of light ahead, a mere flicker that could just as well have been his imagination.

Adrian had seen it, too. “Bloody hell! Now they’re in front as well!”

“Feel your way along the wall,” Jason advised. “Somewhere along here is the sacrificial chamber where that other passageway comes in.”

“An’ what is making you think we’re the only ones knowin’ aboot it?” Adrian asked. “They could jus’ as well be comin’ through there, too.”

Adrian had the optimism of a man mounting the gallows.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

Eighteen-wheelers owned the interstate late at night. They rushed by with a blaze of headlights and a whoosh of air that made the old flatbed truck shiver, sometimes so hard that Rassavitch feared the single container on the back might come loose from its restraints.

The container.

When he had arrived at the Savannah bus station, a man had brushed by him, shoving a slip of paper into his hand. The paper bore what Rassavitch thought was a street address, a guess confirmed by the cabbie who had driven him away from the Greyhound terminal. In minutes, the taxi had been cruising through a seedy neighborhood where the few functioning streetlights showed houses thirsting for paint and weedy yards hosting rusted hulks of automobiles. The occasional resident strode quickly along cracked sidewalks as though in a hurry to get off the street, casting only a glare of resentment at the wealth implied by a taxi ride.

The cab slowed and the driver was scanning the few street numbers. He stopped in front of a house showing no lights but with a flatbed truck in the dirt driveway. “This looks like it.” He turned his head, looking up and down the deserted street as if expecting an assault any minute. “You want, I kin wait here till you inside.”

Rassavitch shook his head, peeling the fare off the wad of bills that was ever diminishing.

As the cab’s taillights hastily retreated to an area where passengers were more likely, Rassavitch circled the truck. Through the slats of the sides he could see a single large box on the flatbed. He looked around. Surely someone had been watching the vehicle. In this neighborhood, it would not have still been here otherwise.

The door to the cab was unlocked. As he heaved himself into the driver’s seat, he noted that the key was in the ignition and a road map of the eastern United States was taped to the dash. He cranked the engine, surprised at an even purr inconsistent with the shabby body. He made one last effort to peer into the shadows around the house before putting the gear into reverse.

So far, the ride had been uneventful, the silver-on-green mile markers slipping by rhythmically. Between eighteen-wheelers, the symphony of a late-spring night in the South flooded the cab through an open window: the constant argument of the katydids, the chirp of crickets, and an occasional shriek of some night raptor. The sounds were almost hypnotic, totally unlike the moan of the night wind across the Siberian steppes of his youth.

Another behemoth of the road roared by, drowning out the music of living things and snapping Rassavitch’s attention back to the highway in his lights.

I-95 had been marked in red on the map with a small town in Virginia just south of Washington circled. On the margin, in Russian, had been the words for tomorrow night. He had torn them off and shredded the small slip of paper. He had no idea why he must deliver the truck and its cargo overnight, nor would he ask.

He would simply do it.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

Jason no longer touched the carved stone wall; only empty space. With his hand holding Maria’s left, he probed the darkness.

“We must be in the chamber,” he whispered. “The secret passage is here somewhere on the left.”

The flicker of lights from behind them as becoming a constant glow.

“Aye,” Adrian replied sotto voce, “but can we find it in time?”

“Only if we all try. Let’s spread out as far as we can and still hold one hand; use the other to search the wall.”

Jason was moving when he heard voices echoing in the tunnel in front of them. Lights were getting close enough that he could distinguish gray forms that were Adrian and Maria. He estimated that the two groups would meet in minutes.

With the three of them between.

“Here!” Maria said triumphantly. “I found it.”

She pulled Jason toward her to verify that there was a void in the stone. As soon as his hand could define the opening, he pushed her inside, using his other hand to tug Adrian along. The passage was too narrow. Not only did Jason’s shoulders touch both sides, but he had to stoop to avoid smacking his head on the ceiling. Turning his body would have been difficult.

He managed to look over his shoulder in time to see six or seven men pick their way single file along the main corridor behind them, each carrying a flashlight in one hand and a pistol in the other. They wore no gas masks. Their bulky Kevlar body armor attested to the fact they expected trouble of a more ordinary sort. Jason felt Maria tense, and he became aware he was holding his breath rather than risk the sound being heard.

When the dark finally swallowed the reflection of flashlight beams, Jason gave Maria a gentle push. “If we’re lucky, we can make it back to the main passage and out of here….”

He was interrupted by a shout, words distorted as they echoed down the long tunnel. The staccato burst of an automatic weapon was followed by the popping sounds of pistols.

“Who in hell…?” Adrian asked.

“In hell, indeed,” Jason said. “Whatever’s happening, let’s get out of here before they stop shooting at one another and start looking for us.”

With shots and voices reverberating behind them, Maria risked turning on the lamp on her miner’s helmet. Although it illuminated the narrow way, it did little to define the rubble over which the trio hurriedly stumbled. The broad sweep of the light showed the intersection with the main corridor just as Maria stopped suddenly.

Jason ran into her back as Adrian ran into his. “What?”

“Don’t you feel it?”

“Feel what?”

Before she could reply, he had his answer. With each series of gunfire there was a faint quiver beneath his feet, as though he were feeling the sound. A string of automatic fire sent an almost imperceptible tremor through the wall Jason was touching.

Adrian spoke Jason’s mind. “Best we be on our way, ’fore this bleedin’ fox’s burrow falls in on our heads.”

As if in reply, a stream of dust poured from overhead, followed by a rock the size of Jason’s fist.

“It’s the vibrations,” Maria explained needlessly. “There’s nothing shoring the rock up.”

Her observation was punctuated by a grinding sound overhead, another eruption of dust, and a crash as the top of the side tunnel they had just passed through collapsed.

This time Jason was less than gentle as he shoved her forward. “Move!”

Quick movement was difficult. The beams from their lights reflected from dust particles to form a choking, shimmering fog that obscured visibility more than a few inches in any direction. A short distance away, Jason heard the crash of larger stones striking the floor. His sight was wavering as the dust stung his eyes. Every breath felt as if he were inhaling sand. He coughed and tried to spit out the grit grinding between his teeth. His mouth was desert dry.

Were they behind or in front?

Adrian gave voice to the fear Jason was trying to stifle. “How th’ bloody hell’re we supposed to know which way is out?”

“A fifty-fifty chance,” Jason said without the slightest intent of being facetious.

“Aye, laddie, but a certain chance of bein’ crushed if we dinna move quick.”

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

Shirlee Atkins was no more than a cleaning lady. Oh, she had a free uniform furnished by the foundation that supported this big ol’ house, an’ she had the benefit of a union contract, an’ she was called a “custodian,” whatever that was, but other than that, this job wasn’t no different from the ones she’d had in homes of senators and representatives and them lobby people, houses some bigger than this one over to Georgetown an’ Kalorama an’ even Arlington. ’Cept Arlington wasn’t really in Washington, was it? She wasn’t sure.

Anyway, this job paid enough for a small apartment away from the projects where the kids could go to school without dodgin’ between crack addicts, dope pushers, and hos, where the sirens didn’t wail all night. Place like hers, the kids had a chance to grow up an’ be somethin’ more ’n a housecleaner.

But she’d never worked in a house furnished quite like this one. Ever’ day she come to work, walk right up to the columned brick front an’ into that room at the front door. Foyer, yep, that was it, the foyer. Big, two-story entrance, whatever it be called. She never seen no chandelier like that before. Mr. Jimson, he say it be Louie somebody, some French king. Rock crystal, he tell her. An’ those people lookin’ down from their golden frames, most of ’em draped with more fur than your average black bear. Course, they be Russians, and Shirlee understood it got pretty cold in Russia. Still, it suit Shirlee jus’ fine that most of them Russian pictures were out in the little house in the yard, the dacha, Mr. Jimson called it, a place Ms. Post built for her Russian art. Weren’t no nesting dolls there, though. Jus’ paintings and jeweled things.

Cabinets on either side of the foyer full of porcelain, too. Why anybody want to eat off somethin’ painted with flowers ’n’ stuff, she didn’t know. Couldn’t hardly tell if it be clean even when you wash it.

Mr. Jimson laughed when she said that. But then, he laughed at a lot of what she said. Not that shitty you-dumb-nigga laugh some folks had when she said somethin’, but a warm chuckle, like she ’n’ Mr. Jimson enjoyin’ the same joke. He an’ Shirlee, they had a lot of laughs together. Like the time he said Ms. Post done bought his place when she run out of husbands an’ chose it over successive… monog, monag… mahogany. Shirlee hadn’t unnerstood ’xactly what he meant, but she laughed anyways. It made Mr. Jimson happy for her to laugh. He understood when one of her kids needed to go to the doctor or had a problem at school, too. Ain’t easy raisin’ three kids with no daddy. Mr. Jimson understood that, too.

She sighed deeply and wiped away a single tear rolling down one fat cheek.

Mr. Jimson.

Done got hisse’f keeled by a car, steppin’ off the curb two days ago. Driver never found. D.C. cops be lucky they could find the fly on their pants when they needed to piss.

This new man, the one called hisse’f some Russiansoundin’ name, look like somethin’ outta one o’ her kids comics: big guy, head shaved, and from some country other than this one. He hardly spoke to nobody, all nervous and such. Yesterday, he ’bout jump outta his skin when Shirlee come up ’hind him to ax if she could leave a few minutes early. Him standin’ there, lookin’ outta the dinin’ room window into the rose garden.

Shirlee guessed he was thinkin’ ’bout that meetin’ gonna take place in that room. Must be some kinda meetin’, needin’ thirty chairs around the marble inlaid table.

She needed to vacuum that rug, polish the table again ’fore any meetin’ started. She wasn’t too sure ’xactly what sort of meetin’ gonna take place, but she heard tell the president hisse’f gonna be there. She wasn’t ’bout to have no president come in ’n’ think Shirlee Atkins was no sloppy housekeeper, no, sirree, Bob.

Thing was, those men diggin’ in the rose garden right outside the French doors. They prolly Russian, too, judging by the way they talk English jus’ like the new man. Make sense, the house full of Russian art an’ all. She’d have to keep watch on ’em, see they didn’ track no dirt into her house. Funny thing was that most of the diggin’ in the rose garden should be in winter, when the plants were dormant. She’d heard tell that some of the mens come to this meetin’ wanted some plants of their own. Why? Them roses pretty ’nough for anybody.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

Maria tugged at Jason’s shirt. “This way.”

He could barely hear her over the increasing clatter of falling stones. “You sure?”

“You are the one who said we had a fifty-fifty chance. I’d prefer to take mine in the direction from which the air is moving.”

For the first time Jason noticed the swirls and eddies in the mistlike cloud of grit. They definitely had a consistent flow, a river of air that could come only from an opening to the outside.

But which opening? There could be unclimbable vertical shafts.

In which case he would be no worse off than he was.

Those odds he could live with.

With Maria leading the way and Jason holding Adrian’s hand, the three made their way along the tunnel, pausing only as larger and more numerous rocks fell around them. No one spoke. The rumble of a shattering rock formation would have had made conversation difficult, and to open one’s lips was to invite a mouthful of grainy dust. Jason even managed not to swear when he barked his shin on a jagged boulder.

The echoes below the earth had made it impossible to tell with certainty the direction of the gunfire. Wherever it had come from, it had ceased. Jason supposed the combatants had exhausted their supply of ammo or people to shoot.

Or were trying to get out before the shaft collapsed.

He listened for the sound of feet on the rock floor behind them, but he doubted he could have heard a team of galloping horses over the sounds of the tunnel falling in.

The billowing dust seemed to grow lighter and lighter until its shine actually hurt. He was squinting, eyes as close to shut as possible, when the air he took in was suddenly free of rock particles and he felt a gentle, warm breeze on his face. Instead of a dark tunnel, he was looking at a bay, the gold dust of sunlight sparkling across its blue surface.

Using a shirtsleeve to wipe away what felt like layers of grime several inches thick on his face, he gulped in the clean, salty air. Maria slid down the rock face as though her spine and legs had turned to wet noodles. Adrian was alternately tilting his water bottle to his lips and washing out his mouth.

“Hey,” Jason said, “c’mon. We can’t stay here. No matter who comes out of that entrance, they aren’t going to be friendly.”

Maria struggled to her feet. “I understand the first group, the ones with gas masks, were the same people who tried to kill us in Sicily and Sardinia, some sort of ecoterrorists. But the second?”

Adrian pointed to a pair of plain but shiny black Lancias. “I’d fancy them to be police of some sort.”

“Makes sense,” Jason agreed. “Somehow they guessed we’d be here. Good thing they came when they did.”

“Good for us,” Maria said, watching dust belch out of the mouth of the cave. “Perhaps not so good for them.”

As though her words were prophetic, the hillside trembled for an instant, then was obscured in a tornado of dust and rocks. None of the three said a word for perhaps five full minutes.

“Those policemen,” Maria finally said. “They are trapped inside.”

“So are Eglov and his thugs,” Jason added.

“Ye really think so?” Adrian asked.

“Who else would have been down there other than someone who was planning to use the gases emitted by the pumice? They were all equipped to deal with it.”

“But of what use to them would be nonlethal ethylene gas?” Maria wanted to know. “It is effective only in enclosures.”

“I don’t know,” Jason admitted. “A hallucinogenic, nonfatal gas, usable only in enclosed space. But at least we now know what the “Breath of the Earth’ business was about. I’ll send the info to Washington and let them sort it out.”

“Do that on the way,” Adrian suggested. “We’ve na’ business hovering aboot here like drunken sods after last call. You can be sure the local constabulary’ll be on its way when those poor devils in the cave don’t return. Let’s get what little kit we left at that wee hotel las’ night an’ be gone.”

Jason turned to walk down the slope, sidestepping pebbles and rocks still tumbling downhill. “Better yet, let’s not go back to the pensione. If the cops knew we were here, they’re gonna look around. They’ll find that an American and a woman fitting Maria’s description checked in and never checked out. They’ll assume we’re in that cave, too.”

“Fine for you, laddie,” Adrian observed, fishing a plastic bag out of his back pocket. “But sooner or later the lass has to go back to her work, an’ I’d like to go home m’self.”

“Easy enough for me,” Maria suggested. “I was duped by the handsome American spy who made me think he, too, was a volcanologist. By the time I found out otherwise, I was his captive.”

Adrian had removed his pipe from the bag and blew through it with a wet whistling sound. “An’ was madly in love, too blind to see the possible pitfalls.”

Jason looked at him skeptically.

“I’m na’ ’round th’ bend, lad. ’Tis the stuff of Italian fiction. They love it.”

“It might work at that,” Maria agreed.

“So, you just go back to work like nothing happened?” Jason asked.

The question did not come from idle curiosity. He remembered her vow to return to her job as soon as any volcanic exploration was over. He had managed to avoid thinking about it. Since Laurin’s death, women had entered his life for an evening, occasionally a weekend, and exited just as casually. In most cases he had watched their departure with a relief he suspected they shared. They had made his life less empty by supplying a diversion or even an imitation of love, a masquerade that shriveled and died in the morning’s light

Not Maria.

He admitted he did not want her to leave. For the first time since his wife’s death, he could actually imagine a more permanent relationship. There was something about that gap-toothed smile, the tenderness they shared after sex, even the ludicrously expensive Hermès scarfs. Mostly, there was that unexplainable something, that feeling that defining it would reduce it to the banal.

But had she changed her mind since that night on the Costa Smeralda?

“ ’Twould be best if she put a day or so between here an’ returnin’ to her normal life,” Adrian observed. “Wee bit too coincidental, she manages to escape at joos’ the time her captor is buried under a hundred tons or so of rock. I propose we leave the Volvo here, go back to Silanus for a day or so. Nothing happens there without people knowing aboot it. I’ll have m’ neighbors sniff out what they can before you return to whatever volcano you’re workin’ on, lass. Give me time to see how much muck I’ve gotten m’-self into, too.”

Jason tried not to show his anxiety as Maria considered what Adrian had said.

He also tried not to show his relief when she replied, “You make sense. A few days, then. But how do we get back to Sardinia without being seen?”

Jason leaped in. “They won’t be looking for us if they think we’re under all that rock, particularly if we go separately.”

“Separately?” She looked apprehensive. “But what if some of those… people are still looking for us?”

“Eglov’s people?” Jason asked. “I’d guess they’re permanently entombed in Hades. Talk about just deserts! If not, another reason to lie low at Adrian’s place for a few days. He can use his neighbors there to let us know if someone’s looking for us.” He reached into a pocket and produced the BlackBerry-like device. “Right now I gotta phone home.”

Adrian put out a hand, tugging Jason’s sleeve. “Not now, laddie. Give us long enough to get as far from here as possible before someone comes to check on the coppers we left in there.”

Jason was staring at his communication. “Something must have hit it. It’s not working.”

“Anything that canna wait?”

Jason shook his head. “Can’t think of anything.”

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

Rassavitch’s eyes felt as though they were full of sand, and his back was telegraphing pain all the way down his leg, but he was thankful for the safe trip.

He forced his eyelids open a little wider to read the address the man had given him at the convenience store a few miles back, the last place on his primary instructions: I-95 to the Beltway, to Rock Creek Parkway to…

He rubbed the back of a hand across his face and bit his lip in hopes the pain would keep him awake.

He would complete this mission.